Spoiler alert: This article discusses plot points from episodes of "Dear White People" and "The Handmaid's Tale." If you are not caught up on these series and do not wish to have a couple of significant twists ruined, stop reading now.
None of the episodes leading up to the second season finale of “Dear White People” adequately prepares us for the moment when Sam White meets, um . . . let's call her "Dark" Sam White.
That secondary descriptor refers to the tainted moral alignment of Rikki Carter, the conservative firebrand played by Tessa Thompson. Netflix asked critics to refrain from revealing Thompson’s cameo prior to the return of “Dear White People” at the beginning of May; Thompson originated the role of Sam in the film that inspires the Netflix series, in which she’s played by Logan Browning.
So when the series’ version of Sam, the passionate, outspoken and combative host of Winchester University’s radio talk show “Dear White People” sneaks backstage to confront Rikki minutes before she’s set to take the stage for a campus speaking event, it’s more than merely a thoroughly meta moment. Theirs is the meeting of matter and anti-matter, annihilating Sam’s concept of who she is by presenting her with the worst of what she could be.
“I love the character!” Rikki tells Sam after admitting she’s listened to her show. “She’s 'sista girl,’ but can articulate the fuck out of a multisyllabic synonym for oppression. Genius!”
“She is not a character,” Sam angrily retorts.
“Oh not yet, but give her time, hon,” Rikki says. “Keep building up a following online, maybe get a few bookings on the local news circuit. In no time, you'll be on cable."
“It's so easy nowadays," Rikki adds. "Just wait for a shooting. Any kind will do: unarmed black teen, a school, a church or wherever the next misogynistic white lunatic decides to unload his guns. Just hop on that talking head train. Because when the world gets hold of her? Game over.”
I’ve been thinking about Rikki a lot lately, and Serena Joy, the wife of Commander Waterford on Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”: same type of woman, but different in fundamentally vital ways. Each is a signpost on the road to the collective hell that waits us all, and if each bears a resemblance to real women, it’s because they will always exist in some form.
Yvonne Strahovski, the actress who plays Serena Joy, is the kind of flaxen-haired beauty beloved by right-wing radio and television. Commentator Tomi Lahren is her closest equivalent in the real world, appearance-wise.
That said, Serena Joy works from a modicum of reason — a kernel, twisted though it may be. Lahren is a bomb-thrower whose main purpose is to command attention, punching down at minorities and liberal women, spewing whatever toxic messaging is most pleasing to the NRA and the "alt-right" at any given moment.
And she attempts to be all things to the right-wing spectrum: She’s pro-choice but detests feminism, although she admires strong women and lauds female empowerment, lately through gun ownership. Lahren’s response to the latest school shooting at Santa Fe High School is entirely unoriginal but probably netted her another paid speaking gig.
“Now is a time for healing, for togetherness, for prayer. It’s not the time to use this tragedy as a political prop for gun control but the left can’t help themselves and . . . to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel . . . will never let a good tragedy to go to waste,” she declared on Fox News.
Currently Lahren is making headlines due to a viral video making the rounds, featuring a man cursing at her and another person throwing water on her at a Minneapolis restaurant where she and her parents were having brunch.
Celebrities of all political stripes, including Kathy Griffin, have shown up on Twitter to decry the incident, as people of good conscience should. Assaults have a way of escalating quickly and nastily, especially in the realm of punditry; supporters back up rhetoric by threatening violence upon whatever threats their heroes decide to name.
Coincidentally we see frightening proof of this in the most recently released “Handmaid’s Tale” episode, titled “First Blood,” in which we see a flashback of Serena Joy appearing at a speaking engagement on, yes, a college campus.
When she takes the stage, she’s booed into silence, driven off and, shockingly, shot as she tries to make an exit, the bullet wound revealed as the source of her infertility.
Both Serena Joy and Lahren hold crude viewpoints, and in this episode, Serena Joy is demonstrably cruel to Offred (Elisabeth Moss) merely for the sake of putting her in her place, intentionally dropping a knitting needle on the ground and forcing Offred to retrieve it for her, to prove to a young wife — a teenager — that she outranks the Handmaid.
At least Serena Joy’s convictions, outlined in a book that becomes one of the founding texts of the patriarchal, Christo-fascist nation called Gilead, are in response to plummeting birth rates. A data point, in other words, not merely emotion, vanity or opportunism.
Serena Joy herself, whom Strahovski imbues with an icy steel, is the personification of the trickle down nature of oppression. She holds true to her path because she believes in it fiercely, and she’s also a woman of agency in the world before she came “under his eye.” And "The Handmaid's Tale" presents Serena Joy as an oddly sympathetic character. She's particularly astonishing here: after she’s shot, as she bleeds from her bullet wound and her husband Fred (Joseph Fiennes) weeps, she growls at him not to cry.
What happened to Lahren is wrong. What happens to Serena Joy in that episode is a horrific crime. But in different worlds, real and fictional, each woman makes a career out of writing the terms of her own submission and defeat. Serena Joy blames humanity’s existential crisis fertility rates on the refusal to embrace our biological imperative and “traditional” values — her definition of feminism, in other words.
Everything she does leading up to that life-altering appearance, and afterwards, unleashes a waterfall of greater crimes against humanity and her own gender.
That said, we never see whether Serena Joy qualifies to appear on “Fox & Friends,” where Lahren is a regular. Rikki Carter is prime Fox material, though.
Rikki’s Winchester show marks the culmination of a “Dear White People” season in which Sam and other black students at the fictional Ivy League institution endure a rising tide of "alt-right" aggression.
A troll (later revealed to be the vengeful gay Latino former editor of a campus newspaper) attacks Sam online, goading her into battles and feeding into threats to her physical safety. The campus radio station greenlights a conservative wing-nut response to her show titled “Dear Right People,” and through it all, confused students in the middle struggle to navigate the rising tensions.
Rikki’s speaking event represents the peak of that strife, but Simien also uses it to call attention to the concept of roles, especially ones that black students feel they have to live up to. There can be a price to showing one’s authentic self, but evolving it into a part can also be vastly lucrative.
Strangely enough, season 2 of “Dear White People” debuted only a few days after Kanye West declared himself to be a "free thinker" by opining that slavery was choice. To this day, most people agree that the comment itself is sheer ignorance but many people still wonder if he really meant it. And who came calling after West’s comment broke the internet? Right-wing media outlets, offering him a seat on the pundit train.
As “Chapter X” starts, we see a couple of white kids, desperate to be “woke,” casually refer to Rikki Carter as “Tan Coulter,” but to Sam she might be the Host of Wokeness Future, where her moral principles will eventually be supplanted by her character, as in the version of Sam White that sells books and a brand by shilling opinions that support the agenda of people in power.
“I got my start arguing absurd right wing views so I could win debate championships,” Rikki tells Sam. “So what if you're good this week and I'm bad the next? What matters most is who is powerless and who is powerful.”
Although “Chapter X” is written by Njeri Brown and series creator Justin Simien, who also directs the episode, Rikki’s chilling and frighteningly honest monologue came straight out of Simien’s brain, one of those midnight downloads writers experience. He brought it to his staff and, with a few storyline refinements, filtered it through Rikki.
“It doesn't matter what part you play so long as the distraction helps those with the real power keep their fiefdoms nice and hidden,” Rikki tells Sam. “Keep in mind that I'm stacking these checks so I can build a goddamn kingdom of my own. Because in this country, all that matters is who holds the gold and owns land and its many resources.”
And though Simien admitted in a recent interview with Salon that he had not yet familiarized himself with personalities such as real life conservative pundit Candace Owens (to whom Rikki coincidentally bears a slight resemblance), what the character represents is depressingly ageless and transcends skin color.
“It's just a very complicated time on television right now,” Simien told Salon recently, “because how do you discern between someone who's being their authentic self on television and someone who is setting us back? It's a very gray area.”
This leads into an important distinction between the Tomi Lahrens of the world and the Rikki Carters, who we contend with in the form of Omarosa Manigault, Owens and the variety of black conservative commentators arguing talking points their white counterparts would be called racist for saying out loud.
Lahren’s looks and her status as a blonde white woman with that essential “Fox” look can keep her in rotation for years to come, allowing her to repackage herself endlessly until she can parlay herself into a mainstream gig.
If Lahren plays her cards right, she’ll have a number of paths to choose from: runs for political office, funded by deep-pocketed donors; her own media empire, which she’s building right now; maybe even a broadcast network gig, provided she rebrands herself strategically, a la Megyn Kelly.
Rikki, meanwhile, speaks to the trade-off black right-wing pundits make when she says to Sam, “We both picked what worked for us because girls like us need to get from the former to the latter as soon as possible, by any means necessary.”
Ironically, the black conservative’s shelf life tends to directly correlate to his or her integrity. Rikki lacks integrity and knows she’s only useful to the conservative platform for as long as her popularity holds. And “Chapter X” serves up just deserts for the initially confident and cocksure Rikki, who struts onstage to be greeted by a sea of black and brown people whose stony expressions deflate the hot air from her attention-seeking diatribe.
The time always comes when the pundit has to walk among the people from whose pain she profits, and they might have feelings about it. In "Dear White People," Rikki's comeuppance in no way endangers her and is still deeply satisfying. Lahren may never get hers, that water toss notwithstanding. As long as those checks keep clearing, she'll keep pumping out the bile, and we can expect any attempts at clarifying rebuttals to keep rolling right off.
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